You would think Eastleigh was the only by-election in the world at the moment, but yesterday Liberal Democrats in Chelmsford saw the reward for their hard campaigning efforts when Graham Pooley saw off the Tories to win a Council by-election. He increased the Liberal Democrat share of the vote by 17.7%. TheConservatives saw their vote fall by 3.5%.
The result, from the Chelmsford Liberal Democrats website, was as follows:
Graham Pooley (Lib Dem) 543
Conservative 423
UKIP 280
Labour 129
Green 47
Congratulations to the Chelmsford team and to the new Councillor Pooley.
It’s also worth mentioning a strong performance in a by-election in Scotland, on South Lanarkshire Council, last week. Liberal Democrat David Baillie was the only candidate to increase vote share from last May, finishing second, just over 300 votes behind Labour and over 200 votes ahead of the SNP who had won the seat in May. The by-election took place in the ward where former Liberal Democrat MSP and minister Robert Brown is a councillor and the result represents a 4.3% swing from Labour to Liberal Democrat.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
One Comment
This is another brilliant result for our hard-working Chelmsford team.